I seem to recall there was a way to play .swf files without a browser. It might be cool to see a standalone flash player, maybe a little like the Electron framework.
It would be like any other desktop application. You're running code of which you presumably know and trust the provenance. It's not like a malware Flash ad written by someone who found a security hole in the Flash player, that is loaded into a random web page by an unsuspecting user.
I recall seeing it on Windows too.