I don't think they were advocating for Safari either...

I took that as a subtle rib against Safari

Safari and Chrome are closely related.

Not so close that they don't often display things differently.

Gmail and Google Docs for instance operate fairly poorly on Safari. Gmail often has UI glitches (e.g. the top part sometimes scrolls up permamently with no way to get it back). Google Docs on Safari lacks support for many features that Firefox seems to support—I've seen many examples of Docs that appear fine on Firefox but appear mangled in Safari. The engine in Safari seems to differ enough from Chrome that it has different approaches to rendering things. Either that or Google is deliberatly pushing faulty codes to Safari. Not sure which...

The engine used in Chrome is a fork of the one used in Safari, which is a fork of Konqueror's engine (KHTML).

Safari runs on iOS (iPhones, iPads) too. Huge installed base.

The same can't be said about Windows Phones

Nobody at my company uses an iOS device. I'm the only one not on Windows and I use Ubuntu.

If you look at the global marketshare, Android dominates iOS.

The point is that I can test on Windows without a Microsoft device or giving money to Microsoft to install Windows somewhere. I have no way to test anything on iOS or even Safari.

Android dominates iOS in terms of market share, sure. And testing for Android is a much worse nightmare.

When I test my site in Safari in an iPhone and an iPad, I’m fairly sure it works on every other reasonably recent (think three years old or maybe even older) iPhone or iPad. Android? Well, there are so many browsers on so many different Android versions, am I supposed to own a fleet of devices, each with a fleet of browsers? (Plus the fact that I can’t really justify purchasing a flagship Android phone for testing, so I only have a crappy one and I hate every second with it; that’s more of a personal thing.) So in the end my attitude with testing on Android is don’t even bother.

You are saying like if almost 1 billion of WIndows 10 users aren't huge installed base?

Well they don't all use Edge. The majority of them use Chrome!

Exactly. Everyone on iOS uses Safari (either direct or as underpinnings for "Chrome", "Firefox" etc browser interface someone might want to put on top of it)

Maybe not Windows phones but definitely Android phones. Because Edge is available on Android and seems to be quite popular. And that is a huge market, bigger than ios'.