X-RAY · 14 SEPTEMBER 2026
Brave against Chrome: what left the machine on four websites
In two minutes each on El Tiempo, El Heraldo, YouTube and Mercado Libre, 151 advertising and tracking names left the machine with Brave and 211 with Chrome; 145 left with both. Brave made the machine look up nine of its maker's services the moment it opened.
How to read this. GUARDIANA writes down every name the machine asks to resolve (DNS). What is compared is the two browsers on the same four pages, for the same time, with fresh profiles.
Scoreboard
Out of the 217 advertising, tracking and telemetry names seen across the whole test, how many each browser let through and how many it kept in.
| Browser | Let through | Kept in | The maker's own services | Let through the least |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brave | 151 | 66 | 9 | yes |
| Chrome | 211 | 6 | 28 |
Brave let 60 fewer names through than Chrome on the same four pages. It is a result of these four sites on this day, not a general verdict.
What it says
Brave stops part of the tracking, not all of it: almost three out of every four advertising and tracking names that left with Chrome also left with Brave (doubleclick, rubiconproject, adnxs, pubmatic, criteo, smartadserver, Yahoo analytics, among others). And blocking does not always stop the name from leaving: the browser resolves some names before it stops the request.
Brave
The idle test for Brave is the one at 14:43 the same day (four minutes).
What can be claimed
- Brave makes the machine look up nine of its maker's services the moment it opens, without the person doing anything; two of them are usage and product statistics switched on by default.
- With its default settings, its shields let most of the advertising and tracking names of the news and shopping sites tested pass.
- It resolves by DNS names it then blocks, so whoever answers the DNS (your operator, or whichever DNS provider you use) sees them anyway.
- It avoided 66 advertising and tracking names that Chrome did contact, and it does not talk to Google on its own the way Chrome does.
What cannot be claimed
- That the machine went on to connect to those services, or that it sent anything: what is seen here is that the machine asked for the name. A connection almost always follows, but a browser also looks names up ahead of time and sometimes never uses them.
- What is sent when there is a connection, or what anyone read: GUARDIANA sees names, not content.
- That a site is "spying": these are documented advertising, measurement and delivery services, and each name is published.
- That the one loading least is the best, nor that a low figure means no tracking: they are names, not intentions.
Data and method
Full data: brave-frente-a-chrome-2026-09-14.csv. Method: both browsers opened with a freshly created profile and the DNS cache emptied just before, then the same four sites for two minutes each; names taken from the machine's GUARDIANA ledger for each time window, this machine's queries only. The tools are in the program's repository (site/src/radiografia/); anyone can repeat the test with Guardiana installed.
Brands named as the names of their owners. If you are the owner and something here is inaccurate, write to hola@guardianagroup.com: it is corrected, with the date.