That's a good question. - Rodfather

I believe you need Safari if you want to run iTunes. I'm not sure what else relies on it. - Rodfather

You should be able to remove Safari with no problem. It's just an app that wraps WebKit. Don't remove the WebKit Framework, though, or iTunes and probably many other apps will start failing. - Joel Webber

@Joel I thought you needed Safari to set your default browser preferences....untrue? - EricaJoy

Chrome and Firefox at least include buttons to make *themselves* the default browser, but I believe only Safari has the "select your default browser" UI. Why would you want to remove Safari? There's really not all that much to it -- it's just an app wrapper around the WebKit framework, which you can't remove safely. Kind of like IE on windows -- you can remove the .exe, but it's still there lurking under the hood. - Joel Webber