What is to replace Perl then?

If so, it doesn't seem to be one that many Python users care about. I spend a lot of time in Python web development communities (Django, TurboGears) and its not something I hear complaints about.

urllib does support this directly:

---
from urllib import urlopen
> x = urlopen('http://myuser:mypasswd@google.com/')
> len(x.read())
5856
---

There have, however, been a couple of request nibbles on the issue tracker over the last 4 years or so to add the functionality to urllib2 as well, and no actual opposition to it. Interestingly, there was activity today from a dev saying he was implementing it, noting that it would be trivial to do.

Personally, I think its probably a good idea, but since its just a few lines to handle this case, it doesn't really bother me.

Like I said, this seems something of a cherry-picked example to "prove" that Python's url handling is "not mature". I'm sure that Python and Ruby folks could pick more than a few cherries regarding Perl's problems if they wanted to.