I know that I can associate a popup.html to clicks on the extension button. However, I want it to be a menu, like the one popping up after clicking on Chrome\'s own \"C
You can't.
You can either register a click via chrome.browserAction.onClicked
but show no UI, or open an HTML page in a popup. You can style it to look like a menu, but it will still not be like a native drop-down menu.
Note that you can right-click the extension button, but the menu you get there is fixed. I submitted a feature request a long time ago regarding that, but it never took off. There is a contextMenus
context "browser_action"
now that achieves this.