How to see a Firefox download with a SSH connection?

Just use watch ls -l /path/to/file. You can do an sudo lsof |grep firefox to locate the file if you don't already know where it is. You won't be able to get the percent remaining, only the number of bytes transferred so far (though if you know the URL, you can do a curl --head URL | grep Content-Length to find out the expected size of the download).

"No, this is not possible (without additional software). To my knowledge, Firefox has no built-in way to produce a report on one of its graphical windows with terminal output. In theory, this functionality could be provided by a Firefox addon or an external script.

You could use VNC (or VNC-over-SSH if you like) to remotely view the state of the desktop, including the Firefox window.

Or, you could use GNU screen and download with wget or curl, as suggested by Phoshi. Then connect with SSH and reconnect to the screen session to view the download progress. As a side benefit, wget can continue a partial download if the connection is cut-off."