How slow is 'SLOW'? Is the only purpose of your program to print the requested page?

If you are not married to using sockets the following example uses the LWP::Simple module to do a similar thing:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use LWP::Simple;

my $doc = get 'http://www.perl.org';
print $doc;
[download]

Of course, this is just a very basic example to get you started. In addition to the LWP documentation, see LWP Cookbook for further information and examples.

Other popular modules along these lines include WWW::Mechanize, which may be of interest, depending on what exactly you want to do.

Hope this helps,

Martin