The research button may be more complicated. If the plug-in you are wanting update is working fine, there should be no need to update it. If you are having issues please visit the official product website for it or Google for it as this will help you better.

Firefox may pick up plugins that actually are not important to you, because Firefox picks them up from the Windows registry where external programs can freely list them. So... if you discover plugins with no known value, you might consider disabling them here:

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Plugins category

That probably will reduce your research burden.

Generally speaking, if a plugin is associated with another program, then you can keep the plugin up-to-date by updating that program. Adobe Reader and iTunes would be examples of that.

If there are plugins you're really curious about, you could post more information about those. On my test page, there is a list of your currently active plugins that you can copy and paste: http://dev.jeffersonscher.com/jstest.asp