The whole point of the server core installation mode for Windows Server 2008 is a reduced attack surface - no Windows Explorer, no Internet Explorer, no .NET Framework. That's all well and good but sometimes it's useful to download a file over HTTP to a server core machine. No problem - just download a version of GNU wget that has been compiled for Windows and use that to download the file. It needed a couple of configuration items to get past my corporate proxy server:
set http_proxy=http://proxyserver:portnumber
then
wget --proxy-user=domainname\username --proxy-passwd=password http://uri/
I also installed Mozilla Firefox (v2.0.0.13), Apple Safari (v3.1) and Opera (v9.26) on server core. Safari installed but has a dependency on the Internet Options control panel applet which is not present in server core. Opera had no noticeable issues. Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 installation failed as expected, redirecting to Microsoft knowledge base article 949220. For a text-mode browser, I found a version of Lynx compiled for Windows but it needed NTLM auth support via NTLMAPS which depends on Python.