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One reason to use it: to silence functions that generate warnings when the falsy return value would suffice.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php

5.3.3 Removed the E_WARNING that was emitted when URL parsing failed.

A logical first step would be to fix all of those functions in PHP that end up requiring the use of @. Once that is done then we could move forward with removing all @ use.

Next step, remove all PHP use.

Another one that I ran into at the same time as parse_url is that passing NULL to urldecode would throw a notice, which was simpler to @ away then check first since it always returned an empty string anyway.

According to the changelog for parse_url that is no longer the case for 5.3.3 and up.

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