That is certainly one way to write Go, but I wouldn't call it "idiomatic" when evil the Google Best Practices guide recommends against it[1][2]. I'll wager you'll probably find it in most other Go style guides. This is how the Go standard library itself works. While you can use http.Get() if you want to use the default HTTP client for simple apps, the library provides you the http.Client struct, where you can also override the Transport (RoundTripper interface) and Jar (CookieJar interfaces). The transport interface lets you further override the Dialer and Proxy function.

[1] https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/best-practices#global... [2] https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/best-practices#provid...