Today I crawled a portion of our file shares without incident. Everything is looking good. Except I cannot open any file share links in Chrome or Firefox. IE works flawlessly. Is this known behavior?

Yes. Not a SharePoint issue, just how Chrome, Firefox and Safari are built. They don't take in to consideration more business-y scenarios for the most part. Chrome on Windows only *just* got windows pass through authentication support around v19. Firefox still doesn't by default, and Safari doesn't have it at all. Much less more esoteric functionality like file shares :)

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

File system search result link does not open on Firefox or Chrome

Summary: The file system connector shows URLs with "file://" protocol in search results. However, Firefox and Chrome don't open such links when clicked in result page.