This headline is unfairly editorialized. What the Firefox dev said was that the automatic encoding detecter confusing some ISO/IEC 8859 encodings for each other is an intractable problem, and fixing one Latin text encoding being auto-detected for a different Latin text encoding is a very low-priority use of time. Also, removing the encoding override is completely separate from that, since it's (apparently) a very complicated feature to keep around that 1) breaks webpages (e.g. etrade) and 2) keeps confusing users and leading them think Firefox is worse at text encoding then Chrome.

Regardless of your opinion of the change in question, these two statements are completely different from what the headline implies.