I'd say it's similar to the use of a mousedown to block a right click dialog. Sure, some idiots use it to disable right click, but a lot of applications (See: a

I'd say it's similar to the use of a mousedown to block a right click dialog. Sure, some idiots use it to disable right click, but a lot of applications (See: about everything Google's done) use it very well for creating in-app contextual menus. This adjustment is pretty superfluous outside of iOS though, I can't think of any non-artistic reason to use it that couldn't be solved through transforms and an understanding of how Safari scales things.