Twitter Bootstrap vs "Mobile First"

Question

I've worked on "Mobile First" websites before, and we are now using Twitter Bootstrap for our sites. The problem is Twitter Bootstrap is not "mobile first", but rather "Responsive".

By "Mobile first" I mean the very basic stylesheet for mobile phones loads first, so there is no requirement that the phone supports @media queries.

Twitter Bootstrap loads the whole desktop stylesheet, using @media queries to resize down to mobile.

Is there any reason Twitter went with this method? Surely it's not as compatible, and older devices will not work?

Are there any "mobile first" mods for Twitter Bootstrap I could use or do I have to create my own?

Answer 1

Bootstrap 3 is mobile first! Yay!

V3 is now released, as seen at http://getbootstrap.com/

Answer 2

Having not used Mobile First, but followed and used Bootstrap fairly extensively, this is just the perspective I've come to:

From what I've seen, "mobile first" as a concept is just that, a mobile first approach to development; while Bootstrap was developed as a concise library of tools for modern browsers, and only recently evolved to supporting older browsers and mobile devices extensively.

From the Bootstrap site:

Originally built with only modern browsers in mind, Bootstrap has evolved to include support for all major browsers (even IE7!) and, with Bootstrap 2, tablets and smartphones, too.

From what I've seen though, there is a lot on the horizon for Bootstrap and mobile. Just dig around the GitHub milestones and you'll see a ton of items in the works!