Ideally (IMHO) there would be no globals besides the 4 node keywords required for the module system to function: require, module, __dirname and __filename.

For many of the other modules that are typically globals, you can require them out of the box, such as

var console = require('console');
var setTimeout = require('timers').setTimeout; // same with clearTimeout, setInterval and clearInterval
var Buffer = require('buffer');
// etc...

One of the few standard parts of node that cannot be loaded via require() is process.

The popularity of this npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/process , with almost a million downloads in the last month shows that a lot of people would benefit from having process be requireable. By making it requireable, browserify can then treat it as one of the special compatibility modules and list it here: https://github.com/substack/node-browserify#compatibility