Elementor 3.33 continues to enhance the Editor V4 experience with new CSS-first capabilities, expands accessibility compliance across widgets, updates browser compatibility, and refines internal stylesheet management for better performance and maintainability. Each of these updates reflects Elementor’s ongoing commitment to delivering a faster, more consistent, and accessible website-building experience for both developers and end users.
Editor V4
Elementor’s Editor V4 continues its Alpha phase, introducing major improvements built on CSS-first styling, atomic design, and a class-driven workflow. This release focuses on three key updates that enhance flexibility, consistency, and creative control for developers and designers.
Variables Manager
The new Variables Manager centralizes into a single panel all your design tokens – colors, typography, and sizes). It allows users to view, create, edit, and delete variables in real time, with instant visual feedback across the entire website. Built for scalability and clarity, it simplifies managing complex design systems, ensuring consistency and speeding up workflows.
Custom CSS for V4 Elements
Custom CSS has been completely rebuilt for Editor V4. Pro users can now write element-scoped CSS directly in the Style panel. Each rule is isolated to prevent conflicts, supports specific responsive breakpoints (desktop, tablet or mobile), specific state (normal, hover, active or focus), and offers autocomplete, comments, and real-time previews.
Blend Mode
A new Blend Mode capability introduces creative depth by defining how an element interacts with layers beneath it. Using native CSS blend modes (like Multiply, Screen, Overlay, and Darken), users can craft sophisticated overlays, contrasts, and artistic effects without writing code.
Overall, this version marks another step in making Elementor’s V4 Editor more modular, performant, and design-system-driven—offering greater precision and creative freedom while laying the foundation for its upcoming Beta release.
Accessibility Improvements
Elementor 3.33 continues to strengthen accessibility across widgets and interactions, expanding on the improvements introduced in version 3.32. This update enhances support for the user’s reduced-motion preference and improves assistive technology compatibility in legacy widgets.
Reduced Motion in Flip Box
The “Flip Box” widget includes multiple transition effects (Flip, Slide, Push, Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Fade), each with unique animation durations and delays. Previously, these animations ignored the user’s reduced-motion preference. With Elementor 3.33, Flip Box now fully respects this setting. When reduced motion is enabled at the system level, all Flip Box animations are disabled, ensuring a smoother, motion-free experience for users who prefer minimal animation.
Star Rating Widget
Although Elementor 3.17 introduced the accessible “Rating” widget to replace the older “Star Rating” widget, many sites still rely on the original version. Elementor 3.33 updates the legacy Star Rating widget to better align with accessibility best practices.
Stars have been removed from the accessibility tree, the title attribute has been replaced with screen-reader-only text, and both widgets now share consistent labeling. This update ensures that users of assistive technologies experience clearer, more consistent feedback, whether they’re using the modern Rating widget or the older Star Rating widget.
Updated Frontend Browser Support
It’s been a year since the last time Elementor updated the list of supported browsers. Back then, Elementor 3.26 extended support for modern web capabilities by discontinuing compatibility for older Safari versions.
Now, Elementor 3.33 updates the supported browsers to reflect the evolving web landscape and open the possibility to utilize modern HTML, CSS and JS features.
Supported Browsers
Previous browsers support, since Elementor 3.26:
- Chrome 100 – released on March 29, 2022.
- Firefox 100 – released on May 3, 2022.
- Safari 15.5 – released on May 16, 2022.
New browsers support, since Elementor 3.33:
- Chrome 111 – released on March 13, 2023.
- Firefox 111 – released on March 27, 2023.
- Safari 16.4 – released on March 27, 2023.
New Supported Features
This update aligns Elementor’s frontend compatibility with the Baseline initiative led by Google, which defines a shared foundation of widely supported web features. By adopting this newer browser range, Elementor can take advantage of modern web APIs and CSS capabilities available across all major browsers, ensuring faster innovation, better performance, and a more consistent user experience.
Stylesheet Changes
Elementor 3.33 continues its transition toward modern, bi-directional CSS by removing redundant RTL stylesheet files. Traditionally, Elementor generated two stylesheets per file, one for LTR (left-to-right) and another for RTL (right-to-left) layouts. With the adoption of CSS Logical Properties over the last 20 releases, these separate files are no longer necessary for most internal styles and have been deleted.
Modern Bi-Directional CSS
Historically, Elementor used SASS to compile both style.css (LTR) and style-rtl.css (RTL) files, flipping directional properties like padding, margins, and text alignment. However, nowadays, modern browsers natively support CSS Logical Properties and values, which automatically adapt styles based on the page’s writing direction, defined by the dir attribute (<html dir=”rtl”>).
Starting with version 3.14, Elementor began replacing physical properties (e.g., margin-left, text-align: right) with their logical equivalents (margin-inline-start, text-align: end). This migration shifted direction handling from Elementor’s build process (using SASS) to the browser itself, minimizing the difference between LTR and RTL files until many stylesheets became identical.
Removing RTL files
At this point, after 19 major releases,maintaining this RTL & LTR stylesheet duplication is no longer necessary. Therefore, Elementor 3.33 deleted multiple unneeded RTL stylesheet files. As a precaution, the change currently applies only to the Elementor Editor styles, WordPress admin styles, and other non-frontend areas, ensuring that website frontend remain unaffected.
This cleanup reduces unnecessary files, removes complexity, decreases the plugin size, while maintaining full bi-directional support through logical CSS.
Future Plans
In upcoming releases, the cleanup will be extended to widget styles, which is a more delicate process since it impacts frontend output. This will be introduced separately once additional testing is completed.
Looking further ahead, Elementor aims to fully transition from a SASS-based builder process to native CSS nesting. TThis shift aligns with modern web standards and simplifies long-term stylesheet management. While this is a longer-term goal and won’t happen within the next 12 months, it remains a key objective.
To Conclude
Elementor 3.33 builds upon the solid groundwork laid in previous versions, moving closer to a fully modular, design-system-driven editor while cleaning up legacy processes and embracing modern web technologies. With a renewed focus on scalability, accessibility, and developer flexibility, this release not only improves the current workflow but also prepares the ecosystem for the upcoming Editor V4 Beta. As Elementor continues its modernization journey, developers can look forward to a leaner, faster, and more future-proof platform.
