Wonder if you can recall anything before there was Safari, Mozilla and Chrome.

That one player M$ did try very hard to screw up all sorts of standards by being "innovative" and more "user friendly" aka breaking compatibility.

Document.all, marquee, ActiveX, VBScript... say these words to a senior web developer once and he will want to punch you in the face.

Perhaps the most important reason that Mozilla won web developers to Firefox was to stick to the web standards(which they did not create), rather than creating their own. It's exactly because browser developers learnt a lesson from IE6 and thus make sticking to web standards a super political correctness, that we could have a uniform browsing experience regardless which browser we are using today.

Needless to say, there are countless network protocols which leaves no room for maneuvering when it comes to implementation, you ever heard of anyone coming up with their own version of SSL/TLS protocol?