HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library

If you’re doing HTTP in Python, you’re probably using one of three popular libraries: requests, httpx, or urllib3; I’ve used each of them at different times. These libraries are installed with pip, live outside the standard library, and provide more features than the built-in urllib.request module – indeed, the documentation for that module recommends using requests. Recently I’ve been looking for a new HTTP library, because my previous choice seems abandoned. I was using httpx, but the maintainer has closed issues on the GitHub repo, there’s only been one commit since January, and the last release was over a year ago. The easy choice would be switching to requests or urllib3, but I wondered: can I just use the standard library? My usage is pretty basic – I have some manually-invoked scripts that make a handful of GET requests to public websites. I don’t have long-running processes; I’m not making thousands of requests at once; I’m not using proxies or authentication. There are plenty…