Then its the problem with the other browsers. Internet explorer was pretty much the first browser, then the other browsers came along. Internet explorer was there first.
No, lol.
There's this thing called the
W3C which defines the specs for how the source of the webpages should look (as well as tons of other things). It was founded by the inventor of HTTP (the protocol used for browsing) and HTML (the source language), Tim Berners-Lee. All of the early browser makers (many were before IE, including Netscape which Firefox is based on) followed these standards (at least mostly), but then IE came along when there was basically only Netscape left on the market. And thus began the first browser war. They both "fought" by adding proprietary extensions to the language that weren't part of the spec and weren't supported by the other browser, thus causing the whole "this site looks best in IE/Netscape" message crap. In the end IE "won" and the browser market stagnated from lack of competition while MS added stuff that intentionally wouldn't work on other OSes (ActiveX). Then the new browsers came along which actually made an effort to follow the spec (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc), causing people to make one standard-following W3C edition and then add tons of hacks to make it look bearable on IE (or the other way around) while quite a lot of lazy people said "screw it, let's only support IE". Later on, when IE started losing market share, stuff like this became viable. That said, IE9 isn't nearly as bad as the earlier versions (although you're still doing yourself a disservice by using it).
The internet doesn't work like that; it isn't "those who gets there first gets everything". All current web standards are developed by the W3C in order to be accessible to everyone, not to be monopolized by one greedy company.
They weren't even there first, NCSA Mosaic was.