John W. Gillis is working on what promises to be an in-depth review of WORDsearch 8. As part of this ongoing project, he has published a very interesting chart comparing the features of WORDsearch 5.K (2000), WORDsearch 7.1.1.59 (2007), WORDsearch 8.0.2.40 (2008) and Bible Explorer 4.1.2.9 (2008).

The information he gives about the background of these products (WORDsearch and Bible Explorer) and how they merged back in 2003, is worth noting:

Prior to the merger, WORDsearch was a mature STEP-based product aimed at preachers, teachers, Bible Study leaders and other non-specialists needing a high-quality viewer and search tool for electronic Bibles and supporting library resources. Epiphany was marketing a low-end but apparently influential Bible Study package called Bible Explorer (BE), which was designed around web browser technology, and Internet standards such as XML and HTML. Bible Explorer is built on top of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer framework.

WS7 appeared to be largely an attempt to port the functionality of legacy WORDsearch onto the Internet standards-based framework of BE - a not entirely successful effort. WS8 is a continuation of that effort, yet it also takes further advantage of the inherent web capabilities of the BE framework to incorporate Internet resources into the main Bible study application.

Still, there remains important functionality available in earlier, STEP-based versions of WORDsearch, that has not made its way onto the new platform, five years after the merger.

The comprehensive chart compares some of the core features found in each of these four incarnations, and I think he has researched his subject very well — adding relevant footnotes along the way. I too was a user of WORDsearch 5, and agree with him that some search features were actually superior to what is available today. Some things definitely got lost during the transition from the old STEP to the new CROSS formats, and it is somewhat discouraging to see that development is taking so long to implement something as “simple” as adding a NOT operator to searches, to mention just one example.

The issue of an over-reliance on a given Internet browser (i.e., Internet Explorer), and how this opens up new avenues in the area of usability and linkability, but seems to downgrade the program in other important aspects, is a fascinating one. But I will have to leave the details of that discussion to other techies and programmers.

I recommend you take a look at John’s pondered and well articulated thoughts. While I wait to hear from the company (I’m not holding my breath) about the feasibility of reviewing WORDsearch 8 for Mac (BTW, one of the most frequently read blog posts in the last month or so), this can give you a fair idea on where things stand right now.