I also think networking still is a strong field, and obviously cyber security.
NO. ABSOLUTELY DO NOT GO INTO CYBERSECURITY. There are no jobs left in that field. College degrees are useless, boot camps are useless. Unless you got several years of industry experience, no one will hire you.
Maybe because you can’t make sure the server uses the code it advertises without modification
You’d have the server provide the code to your browser, and do the encryption/decryption client-side.
while the extension is open source and could be downloaded directly from Github by the user.
I would not install an arbitrary browser extension from Github. That’s just bad security hygiene. Extensions have way too many privileges, there’s not enough mechanisms to ensure that an extension is used only on the site that it’s intended for, and there’s no safe way to maintain updates. Heck, even extensions distributed on browser’s official marketplaces have been shown to be ridden with malware.
If you’re going to distribute code to run client-side for encryption/decryption, you may as well consider WASM. At least that’s sandboxed…
You’re saying you don’t want users to have to trust the website code that the server offers. So why would the user trust the extension instead?
It would absolutely cause drag, just not from the wing’s leading edge but from wake turbulence added to the air flow that’s still going over the wing.