I work on a web-based medical records system. In the previous version, main horizontal menu employed ExtJS. It used the standard click to display the sub-menu found in ExtJS. I'm considering whether to change this to hover to display. Certainly hover is more common on websites, but I know some web apps follow the desktop app model of click to display.
I'm read about some of the usability concerns with hover, but it seems if done well (ie - employing hoverIntent or other plugin to avoid the tunnel problem) it can be just as usable and perhaps a little quicker.
Any reason not to use hover for dropdowns on a web-based application? Is there quantitative research showing one method is better than the other?