Selenium is awesome, but requests makes it awesomer. This fork ditches urllib and urllib2 to interact with remote servers and uses python-requests. It fixed many frustrating timeout errors caused from something inside the urllib code.
pip install -e git+ssh://git@github.com/pegler/python-selenium-requests.git#egg=selenium
Note: this was forked and done quickly. some code and notices may hve been (re)moved. This was not intentional and I fully intend to clean things up soon.