Personally, when I've had occasion to fetch anything bigger than a few 10s of Kbytes on a regular basis, if prefer to shell out to wget.

It handles most protocols. It gives reliability with its ability to retry many times and pick up from where it left off when things go wrong. I can throttle the transfer if it is likely to impinge upon my other network activities. And has a myriad of other features if I need them.

As a bonus, it generally runs more quickly than my browser, LWP or any other tools I've tried.