My recollection is very different. Netscape 4.7 seemed to be falling apart all the time at the point when Mozilla reached 0.9.x and started to be usable which made me very happy to promptly switch to it. I don't remember when Mozilla got tabs but possibly they were already in at that point. Of course things got even better once Phoenix/Firebird later to be known as Firefox got started.
The 4.x line of Netscape was really, really bad, on every platforms, not just Linux. I distinctly remember a small period of time, between the time when Netscape 4 came out and the time when I learned about Opera being available on Linux, when I was routinely using lynx, non-ironically, locally. It crashed all the time and had all sorts of weird bugs.
