perl libwww < 5.66

I had a terrible experience lately. I wanted to download a large document from a website and I opted to employ the content_file method. On versions of libwww < 5.66 I found that 'content_file'
$response = $browser->get("$url",':content_file' => $outfile);
Doesn't work as expected. An alternative method was identified Sean M. Burke where in one should use

HTTP::Request::Common;
$response = $ua->request( GET($url), $filespec );

which provides identical functionality but is compatible with older versions.

The article mentioned above can be found at: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/08/20/perlandlwp.html?page=5