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The title might be clearer as "will use less resources." I expected to see, say, Flashblock, which would be an extension that helps use less memory.
So will they be eventually killing off background pages? Background html page is very important for certain types of apps. A media player for example which uses the page to play background music even if the app tab is closed.
I want such an app to stop when I close the tab.
Chrome has an option to disable that. But that's not the point. What i am trying to say is that there are valid reasons for html background page instead of just a script.
This is similar to webOS background apps. You have the main app card, but you can also launch a dashboard, where the app will live in the notification area and you can pull up a little bar at the bottom of the screen with restricted functionality. The dashboard would be like a background page, and music apps often too advantage of the dashboard to display player controls in the notification area. You could throw away the main app card, but your music will still be running in the dashboard, and you can pull up the dashboard to quickly and easily play, pause, and change songs.

This is certainly a use case for music apps on Chrome as well, so I do hope they keep background pages, while encouraging use of event pages when appropriate. For example, I've been thinking about using a background page to check for updates every five minutes and notify users whenever a feed has new articles in their Google Reader. But now, I can use Event Pages instead. Chrome is giving me a more efficient way of checking for updates, but I do hope they keep background pages for the use cases they would be needed.

Incidentally, webOS also had functionality like Event Pages, where you could register a few different kinds of events, such as launch to search or timers, and webOS would call a designated script to respond to the event. The script can do ajax requests and either launch a dashboard (background page), launch the main app, or do nothing and webOS will then kill the script, just like Chrome will kill the event page if it is idle for a few seconds.

I am the author of an app that does exactly what you said. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fddboknafkepdchido...

If chrome eventually drops background html page then my app won't be half as functional as it is today.

While this is a great thing to do, a large portion of Chrome extension memory usage is due to the JavaScript that gets embedded into every open tab. [i.e. O(1) vs. O(n)]