That's definitely not representative of the general sentiment. As far as I'm concerned, probably around 95% of my debugging time is spent on Safari. Stuff usually works like a charm in Chrome or Firefox. Safari is a gigantic pain due to its plethora of bugs (and new ones appearing with each release) and missing features preventing you to easily work around them.
I do admit sometimes I feel Safari to be lagging behind, but I think it's a far cry from the 'new IE'. At the very least it's not a given that it's the problem browser for developers.