I'm using CentOS with Firefox 38.5 and Evince for viewing/printing pdf files. My network is on the slow side. When I click on a pdf link, I get a real quick about:blank white window that hides itself immediately and then nothing shows on the screen until the pdf has completed downloading (which can take a while). Then a window comes up with LOADING . . . and almost immediately the pdf displays. Is there a way to keep evince in the forefront, so a user would know it's doing something and not try to click the link multiple times? Other than this issue, Evince meets the need.

Things to know - I'm not using Acroread, because many pdf's come up with a blank screen, the first time I click on them. I have to close and reopen the pdf to get it to come up. I'm not using the built-in viewer in Firefox 38.5, because it prints portrait, no matter what the orientation of the document should be. I'm not using Okular, because I'm using Gnome and not KDE.

just clicking on a pdf link starts a download to /tmp
then it opens in Evince

just "r-click" the link and select save as
then open it in the Downloads folder

you will get a progress dialog as it downloads

The page we access most often doesn't give me the option to right click the link. When I right click on the link it says "save page as", which of course is saving the page. If I expose the download icon, I can see progress, but it is extremely small and not obvious and we have many users. Is there a trick to get the larger download progress bar to show automatically, instead of the little progress bar on the icon?