When debugging issues with unclosed tags and whatnot, it doesn't matter that much what the content of text nodes is, and including the full text makes it much harder to see the structure of the element tree.

Bug 1046803 is somehow related. It aims at making the markup-view better deal with text nodes. Right now it doesn't do a great job at it, especially if the text nodes contain \n and \t. I think the text nodes should be there, but strings should be trimmed to fit nicely in the markup-view, and perhaps we should have an option to hide text nodes altogether. I know Firebug has a similar option.

If you are wanting all text nodes to be completely hidden I guess this isn't a duplicate, but bug 1046803 will surely be a big help. Right now text nodes take up way too much space. Instead of having some kind of mode where text nodes are hidden, I would prefer to: 1) Fix the whitespace issues in 1046803 so that text content shows up on the same line as the tag 2) Add a pref for DEFAULT_VALUE_SUMMARY_LENGTH (http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/devtools/server/actors/inspector.js#165) - then you could ensure that this was always on one line by setting the summary value to a very small number. The nice part with that would be that clicking on the shortened text node will still fetch the full value from the server in case you do want to see it.

Also, bug 1071067.

I think this is safe to close this as we now truncate node content ( see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8750089 )