A click is definitely preferable to a mouseover for this. In general, "hover traps," mouseovers that expand and then require further mouse movement to escape, are best avoided.
This is a big flaw with a hopefully simple fix. Such a small thing ruined an otherwise pleasant experience. Great job, there is definitely a need for this and it works pretty well.
Edit: with the breadcrumb and icon/file switcher views, you may not even need this hierarchical view...
I actually find it distracting. There was another style Apache Index that looked quite gorgeous. It wasn't fancy, none of that JS / HTML5 stuff, but it was fast and pretty.
I don't recall what it was called. If anybody knows the link?
Is there a way to do something similar in nginx? Currently I only use the auto index but the listing page is very ugly. I'd like to create an html template if possible and if not, some way to write an indexer in another language (such as ruby) would be nice as well.
The main difference I can see is that the classical view does actually display the contents of the directory, while the "beautiful" view is completely empty. Or is firefox 5.0 too old for HTML 5?