The people working on browsers care about their users being able to use the internet in their browser. Absent the specification work that just wasn't possible - it took years to get webkit to the level that you could reliably expect all pages to work, even when spoofing the user agent (sites used to user agent gate access to only Firefox and IE, nowadays they just block every that isn't chrome[1]). The specification work helps everyone - without it you have to spend immense amounts of time reverse engineering whatever features other browsers ship if sites start using it, and similarly you don't have to worry as much that if you ship some feature some other browser will implement it slightly differently and then you have to reverse engineer what they did in the feature you shipped without specifying. That used to happen a lot. Similarly producing a specification and going through the standards groups can help identify issues and prevent them becoming a problem before the feature is shipped. It's super easy to go "I have a problem" and then make a feature that solves your specific problem rather than the more general issue you're working with. Back while I worked on webkit, Google engineers were chronic for this, and the problem is they would then frame any pushback as being "you hate the web" rather than "oh yeah, maybe we should have one complete spec instead of dozens of slightly different overlapping ones".
Overall I'd say the bulk of folk I worked with from pretty much every company I interacted with cared specifically about the web as platform independently of whatever their employer might be doing (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Yahoo, Facebook, are all companies I recall having significant amounts of communication with, as well as various academics, oss projects, etc and there are very few times I encountered bad faith behavior).
[1] Commercial site developers, especially "enterprise" ones, are absolutely abysmal developers. The only thing that has changed in the last few years is them switching from IE only to Chrome only.
Overall I'd say the bulk of folk I worked with from pretty much every company I interacted with cared specifically about the web as platform independently of whatever their employer might be doing (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Yahoo, Facebook, are all companies I recall having significant amounts of communication with, as well as various academics, oss projects, etc and there are very few times I encountered bad faith behavior).
[1] Commercial site developers, especially "enterprise" ones, are absolutely abysmal developers. The only thing that has changed in the last few years is them switching from IE only to Chrome only.