TE@, this is a feature request for platform>extensions which can be handled by rdevlin, supposedly.

Reporter, you can already do different things in different background scripts. What you're probably suggesting is to allow multiple background *pages*. Theoretically it may be useful but practically the current single-page background architecture covers 99.99% of use cases, the rest can be implemented using a custom script loader, if I understand correctly. As for permissions, they're granted for the entire extension URL origin i.e. chrome-extension://id, which includes all pages of the extension, not just background pages.