You could use pure Sockets, see Fetching HTML Pages with Sockets for the basic idea. Here is a working code bit, that you can remove the extra fluff from. It probably has some code that needs improving too.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Socket;

#dosn't work well for images, but you can fix that

my $url  = "http://zentara.net/index.html";
my $infile = $url;
$infile =~ tr#\/#-#;
print $infile;
my $host = "zentara.net";
$| = 1;

my $start = times;
my ( $iaddr, $paddr, $proto );
$iaddr = inet_aton($host);
#$iaddr = ( gethostbyname($host) )[4];
$paddr = sockaddr_in( 80, $iaddr );
$proto = getprotobyname('tcp');
unless ( socket( SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto ) ) {
    die "ERROR Dude: getUrl socket: $!";
}
unless ( connect( SOCK, $paddr ) ) { die "getUrl connect: $!\n"; }

my @head = (
    "GET $url HTTP/1.0",  #maybe better to use 1.0, instead of 1.1 for
+ "no keep-alive" ??
    "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Safemode Linux i386)",
    "Pragma: no-cache",
    "Host: $host",
    "Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, imag
+e/png, */*",
    "Accept-Language: en"
);
push( @head, "", "" );

#Build Header and print to socket
my $header = join( "\015\012", @head );
print "sending request\n$header\n\n";
select SOCK;
$| = 1;
binmode SOCK;
print SOCK $header;

my $body = '';
open (FH,"> $infile") or warn "$!\n";

while (<SOCK>) {
    my $data = $_;
    $data =~ s/[\r\n\t]+$//s;
    $data =~ s/^[\r\n\t]+//s;
    last if $data =~ /^0$/s;
    my $len = length($data);
   print STDOUT "len:$len\n";

    $body .= $data;
    last if $data =~ /\<\/html\>$/is;
    if ( $data =~ /\<\/body\>$/is ) {
        $body .= qq|</html>|;
        last;
    }
    
    print FH $data;

}
unless ( close(SOCK) ) {
    return ("getUrl close: $!");
}
select STDOUT;
close SOCK;
close FH;
my $end = times;
my $diff = $end = $start;
print "Took $diff to access page\n";
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