Is volatile read blocking?

Question

Recently I was preparing for the java interview and realized that I do not know why this code works correctly in multithreading environment. I created 100 threads and only one of them printed test, why it is happening? volatile here works like synchronized, but it should not.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class PrintInOrder {
    private volatile boolean first = true;

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        PrintInOrder printInOrder = new PrintInOrder();
        List<Thread> threads = new ArrayList<>();
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
            threads.add(new Thread(printInOrder::first));
        }
        for (Thread thread : threads) {
            thread.start();
        }
        for (Thread thread : threads) {
            thread.join();
        }
    }

    public void first()  {
        while (!first) {
        }
        System.out.println("first");
        first = false;
    }
}