(Full disclosure: I've been payed to hack on urllib2) For a long time I've been feeling that urllib is a bit hackish, and not really suited to conveniently script web sites. The classic example is the interface to passwords, whose default behaviour is to stop and ask the user(!). Jeremy had urllib2 out for about a year and a half, and now that I've finally managed to have a look at it, I'm very impressed with the architecture, and I think it's superior to urllib.