Twitter Bootstrap vs "Mobile First"

Question

I have worked on Mobile First sites before, and now we use Twitter Bootstrap for our sites. The problem is that Twitter Bootstrap is not “mobile first,” but rather “responsive.”

By "Mobile first" I mean that the first base style sheet for mobile phones is loaded first, so there is no need for the phone to support @media requests.

Twitter Bootstrap downloads the entire desktop stylesheet using @media queries to resize to mobile.

Is there any reason Twitter went with this method? Is it really not so compatible, and the old devices will not work?

Are there any “mobile first” Twitter Bootstrap mods that I could use, or do I need to create my own?

Answer 1

Bootstrap 3 is the mobile first! Hooray!

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

Answer 2

Not using Mobile First, but followed and used Bootstrap quite widely, this is just the perspective I came to:

From what I saw, “mobile first” as a concept is simply the first mobile approach to development; while Bootstrap was designed as a concise library of tools for modern browsers and only recently developed to support older browsers and mobile devices.

From the Bootstrap website:

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

From what I saw, there are many on the horizon for Bootstrap and mobile devices. Just dig up the milestones of GitHub and you will see a ton of items in the work!

Answer 3

A mobile version of Bootstrap's grid layout has just landed on GitHub. It seems that the bootstrap.css kernel is still needed, but the code seems to work.