Catching an error response when loading content for a new window javascript

I have an input element which triggers a popup with a rendered pdf. However, generation of this pdf is going to fail under certain conditions. I would like to catch the resultant error in the original window and render the popup only if the request succeeds. This is trivial to do if I make two requests:

$.ajax({
    method: 'GET',
    url: url,
    success: function() {
        window.open(url);
    },
    error: function() {
        ...
    }
});

But, I'd like to avoid that second request since this pdf generation is quite expensive. I've currently tried the following:

Create empty window, write pdf to DOM, pushState().

success: function(r) {
    var w = window.open();
    w.docuent.write(r);
    w.history.pushState('init', 'A PDF!', url);
}

This fails since r contains a PDF bytestring.

Open a window with the bytestring, then pushState().

success: function(r) {
    var w = window.open('data:application/pdf,' + escape(r));
    w.history.pushState('init', 'A PDF!', domain + url);
}

This fails since the pushState overwrites the initial stream data.

How can I create a new window with the rendered PDF (without using any external library other than jquery) using the response data and then set its url correctly?