That's a consequence of http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=719
Text nodes larger than 4096 characters are truncated when you use Node.getNodeValue() with Firefox.
That's a problem when fetching user avatars which are often larger than 4ko when base64-encoded.
Here is a proposal of solution ( not perfect nor well tested): SimonLeLann@96e5f93