When we actually do this, it does not necessarily convince publishers to fix things. For example: for several months Mozilla has been testing one tiny reduction to the User-Agent string in Firefox Nightly builds (replacing "Gecko/20100101" with "Gecko/16.0"). Zillow.com is the highest-profile site that is broken by this change, and after five months they still haven't even responded to any of our attempts to contact them: http://bugzil.la/754680
It's much better to resist adding things to the UA in the first place, since removing anything later on is a huge pain and inevitably breaks things for users. Mozilla has managed to keep the UA relatively minimal (and successfully reduced it a bit in Firefox 4): https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_user_agent_string_ref...
It's much better to resist adding things to the UA in the first place, since removing anything later on is a huge pain and inevitably breaks things for users. Mozilla has managed to keep the UA relatively minimal (and successfully reduced it a bit in Firefox 4): https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_user_agent_string_ref...