It can download faster due to using more modern features (parallel downloading, If-Modified-Since) but the main focus is to make a cleaner codebase which is built around a reusable library, so it's easier to add features and make other code which uses those features, and so the libcurl monoculture gets a little fire under its ass.

Wget2 has been in development for a few years now. It is meant to be a drop in replacement for Wget with nearly full backward compatibility with all the old switches. In most cases you can replace wget with wget2 and not really realize the difference. For the known differences, please refer to the documentation in the gitlab repo.

There's still a few rough edges though. And we very much welcome any criticisms / bug reports about the same.