They're really not comparable standard libraries. For the most part, the "batteries included" features in the Go standard library are the idiomatically accepted versions of those features in the community, which is not something you can say about Python's standard library. It's a major difference. Using something other than net/http would be a code smell in Go code, but using urllib would maybe almost be a code smell in Python.

I take it you're using urllib2 to make HTTP requests in Python?

When the standard library does the job, there is no need to look elsewhe, unless forced to by third party libraries dependencies.