SWF Files grayed out in Safari's file menu

[Starhorsepax]

This is weird, but apparently it does it in 4 and 5. I just never had cause to notice. I'm working in Flash on a PC, brought an swf to mac to try it in different browsers. It'll open ok in Firefox. But in the Safari open file menu it's grayed out - in spite of the fact that it loads these from websites all the time without issue. So I went into Get Info for the file and found that neither Safari or Firefox were listed under 'Recommended Apps'. It did list Quicktime, which insisted it was not a movie (it even has Flip 4 Mac and Perian).
I finally got it to load by clicking 'Show ALL applications' and clicking open with Safari.

But why on Earth did I have to go thru all that? Does anyone know why mac doesn't recognize a simple swf file as openable on it's own hard drive?

 

[jackerin]

Could be that it just shows the file formats supported out of the box by the application. Flash is handled by a plug-in after all. You could also just drag the swf file from the Finder onto an empty Safari window.

Quicktime actually handles some Flash files, but they need to be uncompressed and version 4 or earlier (iirc).